Buber: Congealing the Whirl of Doom

[Dave Monroe]

Three Dialogues
Buber: Congealing the Whirl of Doom 

[...]

The problem with self-conquest from Nietzsche's point
of view is that for most people it's all too easy. The
"less severely afflicted" are looking for a master who
will help them master themselves. They introvert or
introject not only their resentment, but the mastery
that helps them to overcome that resentment and thus
to become usefully functioning members of society
(where "usefulness" is externally defined).
Self-conquest becomes an internalized channel of
control. 

Thomas Pynchon's sixties version of the same problem,
from Gravity's Rainbow: "Well, if the Counterforce
knew better what those categories concealed, they
might be in a better position to disarm, de-penis and
dismantle the Man. But they don't. Actually they do,
but they don't admit it. Sad but true. They are as
schizoid, as double-minded in the massive presence of
money, as any of the rest of us, and that's the hard
fact. The Man has a branch office in each of our
brains, his corporate emblem is a white albatross,
each local rep has a cover known as the Ego, and their
mission in this world is Bad Shit. We do know what's
going on, and we let it go on. As long as we can see
them, stare at them, those massively moneyed, once in
a while. As long as they allow us a glimpse, however
rarely. We need that. And how they know it--how often,
under what conditions. . . ." (712-13). 

That's the I-It. The I-You-- 

Is just as tightly controlled as the I-It. "Each local
rep has a cover known as the Ego," the I, and the rep
makes sure that all relation is representation, all
dialogue is socially acceptable. Dialogue, shmialogue.
It's part of the Bad Shit. 

[...]

The Counterforce moves beyond the ethical
self-conquest Nietzsche attacked to a liberating
concern with play: Roger and Pig Bodine breaking up
Their dinner party with sick jokes, Roger pissing on
Their executive desks . . . 

Yes. Rather than introverting resentment they
retrovert it. Rather than introjecting control they
reject it. But their solutions still leave them in
bondage to controlled resentment. 

[...]

For Roger and Jessica, late in Part One, that "single
living center" is the Christ Child, isn't it? They
find it--and Pynchon seems to place real hope in it. 

[...]

They find it--but they can't keep it. They lose the
vision of the single living center, and their affair
is reduced to feelings. Two people brought together by
the War. A little fucking to offset the dying. That's
the Counterforce, too--not even feeling for each
other, just feeling against the dead System. 

[...]

When Roger says he has a choice between life on Their
terms and death, even within the System's dualism he's
simplifying drastically. Life on Their terms already
is a kind of death. "Death has been the source of
Their power" (539), the Counterforce's Father Rapier
says. The System is a Calvinist/capitalist structure
of power that replaced the authoritarian spirit-world
of medieval Christianity with the authoritarian
(mock-democratic) matter-world of science. But,
reduced to scientific terms, the living earth became a
dead rock, the dome of heaven an infinite void, God a
totalitarian fiction. "What if there is no Vacuum? Or
if there is--what if They're using it on you? What if
They find it convenient to preach an island of life
surrounded by a void? Not just the Earth in space, but
your individual life in time? What if it's in Their
interest to have you believing that?" (697). Our fear
of dying drives us into Their arms; our frustration
with a deathly, meaningless universe makes us enjoy
the embrace. 

So Pynchon's a Christian? 

Of sorts. The evidence points pretty strongly that
way. 

He prefers the Middle Ages to capitalism? 

No. Not medieval Christianity. A sixties,
make-love-not-war Christianity. An ecological,
back-to-nature Christianity: "The System may or may
not understand that it's only buying time. And that
time is an artificial resource to begin with, of no
value to anyone or anything but the System, which
sooner or later much crash to its death, when its
addiction to energy has become more than the rest of
the World can supply, dragging with it innocent souls
all along the chain of life. Living inside the System
is like riding across the country in a bus driven by a
maniac bent on suicide . . ." (412). An
anti-Vietnam-War, anti-Military-Industrial-Complex
Christianity. A
loving-community-with-a-single-living-center
Christianity. 

A Counterforce Christianity. 

[...]

My first thought when I read Pynchon on the maniac
bent on suicide is Freud's death instinct. But my
second thought is Buber's longing for fixity, for
congealment and enwrapment. And my third thought is
that rhetorically Buber holds hands with Freud in the
same cookie-jar. [...] The System too wants to die in
its own fashion, and it passes that instinctual need
on to those who live in it. For Freud it is the great
longing for stasis, for ultimate stability--which is
what Buber wants, too, or what his rhetoric suggests
he wants, despite all his overt talk of engagement
with ongoing history.... 

[...]

... Deleuze and Guattari would certainly agree.
Oedipus wants to die, so Freud thinks everybody wants
to die. Capitalism is self-destructing, so Freud
thinks our self-destructive impulses are instincts....

That's certainly congruent with Pynchon's attack on
the System. French sixties, meet the American sixties.
Deleuze and Guattari beat Pynchon to the gate by a
year. 

[...]

The death "instinct" Freud postulated appears
throughout contemporary American "apocalyptic"
fiction--but not as an instinct, as a demonized
caricature of capitalist society. For most of the
so-called apocalyptic American writers, the impulse to
reduce complexity to simplicity, the dynamic to
stasis, the fluid to solidity--life to death--is the
enemy, to be opposed in any way possible. Opposed
especially when they find it in themselves, as most of
them do. 

What ways? 

Outside the System and the Counterforce, Gravity's
Rainbow is rife with ways of opposition, all more or
less ineffectual, but all--well, they're the novel's
only (and severely circumscribed) source of hope. 

The System is probably too powerful to be overcome.
And if it self-destructs, it will "drag with it
innocent souls all along the chain of life."

[...]

http://home.olemiss.edu/~djr/pages/writer/books/html/3dialogs/buber.html

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